I love the sound of the bone against the plate
and the fortress-like look of it
lying before me in a moat of risotto,
the meat soft as the leg of an angel
who has lived a purely airborne existence.

In these lines Collins revels in the sensuous, slightly comic physicality of eating: the audible “bone against the plate,” the visual “fortress-like” bone set in a “moat of risotto.” The mock-heroic imagery elevates an ordinary meal into a miniature epic scene, while the simile—meat “soft as the leg of an angel”—pushes the description into whimsical excess. The angel comparison also hints at a playful tension between appetite and purity: something heavenly is invoked to praise something bodily. The result is characteristic Collins: a celebration of everyday pleasures rendered with imaginative metaphor and gently ironic grandeur.